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by Darren Rusco
Some simple thoughts here, but often I find myself far away from such simplicity! There should be a flow of mission and church that goes something like this:
Who? Who is Jesus? This is the starting point. This is sacred. This is unchanging. We need to encounter Jesus for anything else to matter. And to encounter Jesus is to care about the things on his heart. We won't encounter Jesus without caring about his mission. And we won't care about his mission without first encountering him. We will start here, but there will be more. This is Christology.
What? What has Jesus asked of us? This is mission. This is representing our king to the world. This is commanded. This work must be connected to who Jesus is. This is us carrying out HIS agenda, not our own. Disastrous consequences occur when we are in the "what" without first being in the "who". This is missiology.
How? How will we accomplish what Jesus asked of us? This is form and structure. This is stewarded to us. This is usually not sacred. This can only be born from our understanding of what mission is. This cannot be decided without first being in the "who" and in the "what". This is ecclesiology.
This all sounds simple. But here is what happens: we live in the "how", completely disconnected from the who and what. We fall in love with forms and structures without falling in love with Jesus. We feel a "calling" and will go to seminary for preparations. But we were just drawn to a form and structure. As a result, the forms become sacred because that was our first love. In reality the forms need to serve the "what" of the "who". But how quickly we find ourselves in a place where the "what" serves the "how".
We are at the tipping point for the current local church structure. There are leaders who are in love with their forms and structures. They built what they loved. And what happens when the forms no longer serve the mission of Jesus? Will they change the form? Or will they ignore the mission?
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